Facilitating Effective Group Work

The majority of resources listed below include information about facilitating, teaching, and assessing effective group work as part of in class assignments. This also includes links to discussions of teamwork and group dynamics.

Turning Student Groups into Effective Teams offers resources, strategies, forms, and handouts to help develop and support effective teams. Strategies are also presented for facilitating peer assessments as part of evaluating group work as part of an in class assignment.

Duke University’s Center for Instructional Technology provides a resource for supporting teams as an opportunity for students to assess their knowledge and understanding of course material. The webpage offers suggestions for structuring and assessing effective group work.

Teamwork skills: Being an effective group member from the University of Waterloo outlines a series of skills that students should develop and demonstrate to function successfully in a small group. This tipsheet also provides instructional strategies for facilitating effective groupwork and offers a series of reflection prompts to help students examine and reflect on their teamwork skills by developing critical self-awareness.

What are best practices for designing group projects? This webpage from the Eberly Center provides strategies and accompanying examples for creating interdependence among group members and building in individual accountability, seen as an important step toward meaningful collaboration. Strategies and examples are also listed for intentionally developing skills in and demonstrating the value of teamwork. The site lists additional references for further reading.

Griffith University created a Teamwork Skills Toolkit that frames teamwork as an essential skill for students both in the classroom and in the workplace. The document also provides resources and strategies for teaching and assessing teamwork, as well as sample handouts that could be incorporated into the classroom or curriculum.

Teaching Teamwork is a resource created by MIT that offers materials created for an undergraduate course that emphasized the importance of developing teamwork skills. Topics include the importance of teamwork skills as well as strategies for teaching and assessing student development. Each link is a separate document or presentation that can be a template for your own developing curriculum or pedagogy.

Teaching teamwork, written for the Oxford University Press blog, offers insights on and strategies for teamwork in the classroom based on academic literature. There is also some discussion of concerns related to teaching teamwork as well as how to help students improve the quality of their work through critiques and revisions.

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